Music
The music comes out of an extended personal crisis; the compositions found here are a testament to a musician regaining his voice.
I put Joni Mitchell on a short list of the most remarkable pop music artists of the ’60s and early ’70s. Longevity of excellence isn’t the point here, just peak incandescence.
Damn straight, English singer/songwriter Beth Orton was back in the room – after a six-year absence.
I feel that I have lost a dear friend whom I met through profoundly heartfelt recordings and, in the form of interviews, inspiring self-portraits.
The advantage to listening to the recorded Unstuck in Time: The Kurt Vonnegut Suite is that on disc pianist Jason Yeager writes beautifully for septet: the textures he evokes in his arrangements are curiously varied and invariably moving.
Vince Guaraldi isn’t the heaviest of jazz pianists: he played at a time when McCoy Tyner and Bill Evans were omnipresent. But his tunes, his gently humanist approach to music, meant that he reached listeners that others couldn’t or didn’t.
Revelations continue: a composer best known for his sonatas and concertos (the Four Seasons) is a master of vocal music as well.
The Boston Artists Ensemble found the tenderness and understated grace of Robert Schumann’s Piano Trio No. 2.
Classical Concert Review: Radius Ensemble — A Vivid Musical Journey, Filled with Solace and Grandeur
The stormy exuberance of Debussy’s Piano Trio in G major inspired one of the many highlights of this mostly auspicious night.
Book Review: “Folk Music — A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs”
At points Greil Marcus’ digressive style can seem like nervy brilliance, at others, idle whimsy. What ennobles the book is the critic’s love for his underlying subject: the soulful search for a truer America.
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